Naples Theatre Festival

Ditegli sempre di sì is one of Eduardo De Filippo’s most well-known works. Written in 1927, it is a two-act play proving Eduardo’s exhilarating, painful and grotesque genius. The recurrent echos from the Il medico dei pazzi and Le 99 disgrazie di Pulcinella overlap with the noble suggestions drawn from Henry the Fourth and Il berretto a sonagli testifying that Eduardo had been strongly impressed by Sei personaggi in cerca d’autore of 1923. This work can be included in Scarpetta’s pochade genre, characterised by complex plots, intrigues and misunderstandings, that find a foreseeable and reassuring solution at the end of the play.

Michele Murri, the chief character of the play, is really mad; he is a man «obsessed with words, who maintains that people do not use appropriate words, create misunderstandings and troubles». When leaving the mental hospital he seems to have recovered his own wits; he is a well-mannered and reliable man. Nevertheless he takes everything too seriously: if his spinster sister says that she would like to get married with the man living next door, he immediately tells everybody about this wedding; if an old family friend swears that he will make peace with his brother only after his death, he hastens to send a telegram announcing the grievous news; if a neighbour says that Luigino, a young man who courts his daughter, is crazy, he rushes to cut the poor lover’s head, as the head, in his opinion is the place where madness lurks. The coherence of this poor mad man, his hallucinated coherence, inevitably drives him to the mental hospital again. However his madness is free of any rage, pure and compassionate at the same time; it “rears up” only when, with a clear allusion to the political climate of that period (five years after the March on Rome), the beheading of “the other”, of the “outcast” is considered as a possible solution.